In the month-and-a-half since I started the wiki at ObsoleteSkills.com (thanks again for the idea, Scoble), it has been linked to from a whole bunch of blogs and websites, generating almost 3 million visits. Big name sites including BoingBoing, Slashdot, and Daring Fireball have all given me the privilege of a link. What really surprises me, though, is the percentage of traffic generated from each of these sources.

Above is a graph compiled from the top referrers to ObsoleteSkills.com. Looking at this graph reveals a few surprises: most notably that the majority of visits didn’t actually have a referrer, meaning people are just typing the domain into their browsers or using bookmarks, etc. This would imply that a lot of the traffic is from returning users, which is great.

Slashdot and StumbleUpon were, predictably, the next biggest referrers. I was surprised to see how little of the traffic came from David Pogue’s blog, which would seem to be a fairly high-traffic blog, and from BoingBoing, which is one of the most popular blogs around. It is also worth noting that Daring Fireball only linked to the site two days ago, so this won’t be representative of the actual percentage of referrers it might send.

Just so that there is a bit of scale to the graph, the lowest referrer to ObsoleteSkills.com shown on the graph (Gamespy Humor) represents a little over 32,000 visits, and there are obviously a bunch more referrers not showing on the graph.

Note: I’ve mixed the spelling of referrer on purpose, see Wikipedia for details.

Yes, I’ve been at it again and developed another Twitter bot. What makes this one special, however, is the fact that it is my first interactive bot.

So, I would like to introduce you all to @weatherbot - the interactive on-demand Twitter weather service. While it is still very beta, I think it is at a point where it is quite stable. To use it, all you have to do it follow the bot, then send it an @reply with the location you want the weather forecast for. In a few minutes, you should get a direct message from @weatherbot with the forecast for the rest of the current day and the next day in the city you asked for. The bot will report the temperature in Fahrenheit or Celsius appropriate for the requested location.

For example, if you are interested in the weather in Sydney, follow the bot then simply tweet “@weatherbot sydney australia” - without the quotes, of course. As long as you follow the format “@weatherbot city country” it should be able to work out what you want, though for the more generic named places, it might help to put your state/province in as well. The service should work for almost any major city in the world.

For those interested in the technical details, every few minutes the bot grabs its replies timeline using the Twitter API, then creates a queue of requests. From those requests, it will grab your search string and through some special sauce magic figures out the location ID for your request, then grabs an XML packet of the location’s weather forecast using the Yahoo! Weather API. It then parses the XML, extracts the needed information, and forms it into a string which it then sends back to you using the Twitter API as a direct message. The bot manages its queue so you don’t get your weather multiple times from the one request.

Feel free to give @weatherbot a try, and get in contact with me if you get any odd behavior.

Inspired by an interesting blog post from Robert Scoble (yes, he does have them every now and then), I purchased the domain ObsoleteSkills.com and set up a wiki for people to document all those skills that the latest technology really makes obsolete. So far, skills that have been added to the wiki include things like adjusting the rabbit ears on your TV, dialing a rotary phone, and churning butter of all things. That is all great, and I hope that people enjoy it, but to register the domain I had to pay over four times more than I usually do, and in the process I had my eyes opened to a very dodgy system from Network Solutions.

I am coming into this on the tail end, as apparently Network Solutions had been called out on this previously, but the company undertakes a poor practice when a user searches for a domain: the company effectively registers it, and enters it with the status ‘clientHold,’ even if the user doesn’t actually register it. This DNS status usually means that there is a legal issue involving the registrant or a service on the domain, and it causes the domain to still be registered but not resolve to a server. The end result is that anyone wishing to register the domain, not just the person that originally searched for it, must go through Network Solutions to do it, and they can charge whatever they see fit.

This is exactly what happened with ObsoleteSkills.com. Someone, presumably also having seen Scoble’s post, would have searched for the domain using Network Solutions, but didn’t go through with the registration. When I went to register the domain with my normal registrar, it said it was taken, but I was able to register the domain through Network Solutions, albeit at a severe premium.

All this has been detailed quite well by Todd McKinney in his ‘Evil Still Lurks‘ post and a follow-up post.

For those that have iPhones that came with firmware version 1.1.2 or 1.1.3 out of the box, your pleas for a jailbreaking and unlocking solution have been answered. Thanks to the work of Zibri and the folks from Unlock.no, it is now dead simple to jailbreak and unlock these devices - even simpler than it is for older devices. To grab the simple tool to jailbreak and unlock your device, based on Zibri’s original code, head to the Unlock.no front page.

After the resounding success of my firmware 1.1.2 guide, I have decided to put together a guide to upgrading an iPhone to firmware 1.1.3, both jailbroken and unlocked for use on any network. This guide involves a lot of steps, but it will ensure that you have the best possible result by the safest means. Keep in mind that there is no state you can get your iPhone into if you do something incorrectly that cannot be reversed, so don’t be afraid to try.

This guide is for owners of iPhones that came with firmware 1.1.1 or earlier out of the box. Unfortunately, iPhones that came with firmware 1.1.2 or 1.1.3 out of the box run a newer version of a key software component (called the bootloader) that prevents unlocking using this method. Read more…

I have in no way given Office 2008 a thorough working over so do not take this post as a final conclusion, but after installing the new Mac version of Microsoft’s beast and having a little poke around, I have a few first thoughts.

Microsoft Office 2008 is a prime example of Microsoft taking the proven Mac way of doing things and trying to make it better. At this task, they have failed, and what results is a mess of Microsoft thinking on a Mac framework.

The first thing that I noticed is the toolbar, which indeed mimics the standard Leopard toolbar, but is actually Microsoft’s implementation of it and as such the look just isn’t the same. This make Office stand out amongst other Mac applications, and I have absolutely no idea why Microsoft couldn’t just use the standard toolbar. These little user interface inconsistencies are one of the reasons I left the Windows platform, yet Microsoft has again felt the need to make things that little bit different.

The second most annoying thing I have come across are the useless and absurd effects applied across the UI, especially in the Mac equivalent of the ribbon from Office 07. Every click on any element in this area triggers transition effects, and while they might look pretty the first time you see them, it adds a significant amount of time to navigate around and find things in the applications. These effects extend to most of the UI, and even the small view change icons in the lower left-hand corner of the windows glimmer and blink when you point at them. Why?

The design of the Preferences window also bugs me, albeit to a lesser extent. The window pointlessly attempts to mimic the Mac OS System Preferences window, and this really just makes accessing preferences cumbersome and slow - why can the preference windows not look like they do on every other Mac application?

In any event, these UI-level problems aren’t completely deal-breakers, and I am yet to really evaluate the Office 08 applications for their intended purposes. Word is my most used Office application and I will be using the new version to put together my next review, so time will tell if it is good enough to drag me away from Pages.

There have been way too many Twitter-related posts here lately, so I promise that this will be the last one for a while.

In a similar vein to my triviabot, I have made a new Twitter bot called bushbot that, as the name implies, automatically posts random quotes  from George W. Bush, President of the United States of America.

Special thanks to Mr Auld for the quotes, and feel free to leave any feedback you might have.

After a suggestion from @abacab, I have created a little Twitter trivia bot. This bot posts a random fact from RandomFacts.org to its Twitter account every hour. There are some really interesting things coming through on it, so if you like trivia, give @triviabot a follow. I will be adding more features soon, such as being able to ask it questions and to play simple trivia games, but I have to work out the details first.

If anyone has any other suggestions for bots or other Twitter scripts (or anything for that matter), feel free to drop a comment.

I have created a Google Code page to house the source for Twitter Stats. Both the web version and the command line CSV-output version are available through a straight download or SVN.

While the other contributors and I don’t have a problem with derivative works (the code is released under the GPLv2 license), we would appreciate it if you instead thought about contributing back into the project. If you would like to contribute code, make a wiki page or contact me to become a member of the project so you can check-in using SVN. If you do choose to use some of the code in your own projects, please provide prominent attribution and a link back to the Google Code page and/or the web version of the script.

The code is pretty hideous at the moment, and there are quite a few bugs to work out, but please bear with us - we will be making enhancements and bug fixes very soon.

For all those Twitter lovers out there, like me, I’ve put together a little script based on the work found here to calculate some statistics from your Twitter timeline and present them using the Google Charts API.

Statistics include:

• Tweets per hour of the day
• Total Tweets per day of the week
• Total Tweets per day of the month
• Top @replies
• Top overall @s

Please keep in mind that there are probably a lot of bugs in it, and it can take a very long time to process if you have a large timeline. Other than that, enjoy!